Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How Bedros Built an Empire from the Bottom of a Dumpster - 001

Episode Date: June 28, 2017

Few men can say they’ve built an empire. Fewer men can say that and then turn around and say they used to eat scraps out of dumpsters. For Bedros, both are true. In this episode, discover the inspiring and often strange story of how Bedros’s family escaped the Soviet Union and how Bedros went from a life of poverty to creating a global business empire.   Here’s what you’ll discover:   0:50 - How Bedros’s family escaped the Soviet Union and came to America to seek opportunity and freedom. 2:10 - What you can learn from being in “survival mode” even when you’re living the good life. 4:50 - The biggest lesson Bedros ever learned from his father, and how this still gives him a massive advantage to this day. 8:52 - How to spot people who are destined for success. 9:48 - The qualities you absolutely must have in each team member if you want to build a massively successful business.

Hey, have you ever wondered what separates successful people from those who are able to grow empires? Today, you're going to meet a man who is going to teach you all of that and more. Welcome, Bedros Kuland. Craigie, it's great to be on our show. Yes, special guest today. All right, so, Bedros, you are known as the man with the immigrant edge. I call you the epitome of the American dream because you truly live everything that they talk about when they described that. So take us back to 1980 when you first came to this country and walk us through the story.

start of your story. Sure. I'll give you the short journey of this. In 1980, my father decided that we're going to escape communist Russia at the time Armenia and come to the United States. And he bribed the Russian government, $25,000. And we came to the United States with no money, with no ability to speak English, with basically the clothes on our back and one suitcase for a family of five. The next three years were spent eating out of dumpsters, moving from apartment to apartment. One apartment was worse than the other. And dealing with so much advertising. So much challenge, so much pushback from even neighbors who would just literally yell at my dad, go back to your own effing country. I can't understand what you're saying.

You guys are coming to this country and taking jobs from us. And as I grew up seeing that, I grew up having this, one, a chip on my shoulder, this rage and this fire in my belly. But two, having this weird experience of, I thought my father said this is the country of opportunity and freedom, yet we're being yelled at and we don't have much opportunity and freedom. eating out of dumpsters, what do we do? I later discovered that every one of those operat adversities that we had encountered was an advantage. So it's like being in survival mode taught you something that most other people weren't able to have? Yes, yeah. When you're in survival mode, here's what happens. You learn to hunt better, your instincts become better. And so I really believe that

there's something special about staying hungry, being in survival mode, right? And so So as we, did I like being a survival mode, eating out of dumpsters, having my hair washed with gasoline when I got lice because we couldn't afford lice treatment? I didn't like that stuff. But that stuff led to me being stronger and more emotionally resilient as I entered the workforce and later became an entrepreneur. Awesome. Awesome.

So your father brought you here legally, which is really, really important. I mean, you guys were legal immigrants. When did you first feel American? That's a really good question. When I first felt American wasn't until... probably senior year of high school and I'll okay so wait a minute were you cheering for Ivan Drago and Rocky for ha ha ha I must break you so senior year high school senior year of high school is when I first started feeling American here's why

it was senior year of high school that I decided that I need to lose 35 pounds of fat if I had any chance of going to prom and so all of a sudden I started reading muscle magazines and eating healthier and working out and senior year of high school, I started to get noticed by other students. Because you were learning from another true American dream, another man with the immigrant edge. Arnold. Arnold.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Exactly. Exactly. And so as I was adopting the workouts and the eating habits and kind of breaking out of my shell, people started to pay attention and talk to me. And I finally felt like I was melding into the American culture, finally, right? And my whole purpose of losing that weight throughout senior year was so that I can go to prom. and I never had the nerve to ask out Nakaya, who I wanted to ask out for the prom.

But what I did end up doing, it has ended up changing my trajectory, because what I planned on doing was leaving high school, going to technical school, and becoming a smog technician. Effectively, I was going to be the guy that checks the emissions out of your car. Instead, that process of losing 35 pounds, gaining confidence, coming out of my show, making friends not only help me feel American, but helped me realize that my path and my journey is about helping others achieve health and fitness, which ultimately led to creating this empire. Right, right, right.

So you're really proud of what your father did for you and you're really grateful for him. So what are some of the greatest lessons that you learned from your parents? Yes. Yeah, one of the biggest lessons I got from my dad and he would come home tired. He would work three jobs.

He would deliver newspapers from midnight till three in the morning. He would work at a pizzeria washing dishes, and then he would pump gas at a gas station. He had those three jobs. My older brother had three jobs. Older sister had three jobs. My mom had two, and I, of course, was the dumpster diver,

and I would get food out of the dumpster so that we could eat. But the biggest lesson I got from my dad, no matter how tired it was that he got home, he said, work is holy. Oh, I love that, actually. And I'll translate it this way. Effectively, don't ever be allergic to hard work. And I think many people think that they're going to hustle and they're going to grind and they're going to work their butt off.

But their definition of hustle and grind is hitting snooze and just doing a little bit of the work or doing the fun stuff, but not the hard stuff that needs to get done. My dad's whole philosophy was work is holy. In other words, don't be afraid to do the hard work. Excellent, excellent. And so what is the immigrant edge? What is that in its most succinct form?

Yeah. The immigrant edge, if I could just boil it down to its essence, is that when you don't have resources, be resourceful. Got it. It's not break the law or break the rules. It is bend the rules to your will. kind of like ask for forgiveness rather than permission a little bit. Yes, sir.

Okay, excellent. All right. So when did you first become aware of the power and importance of scaling a business rather than just grinding? Yeah, that's a good question. When we all become entrepreneurs, we hustle and we grind, and we just put our shoulders into it to move the business forward. There comes a certain point.

Typically, like for me, it was when my business was starting to do it around half a million to a million dollars a year that I realized I can't keep burning the candle on both ends. At some point I have to get strategic and it's all about scale and structure. And so for me, it was around that $1 million a year mark when I started thinking scale and structure. And it led to hiring the right leadership in my team because I realized I couldn't do it all. And then, of course, using the right people to outsource things. Got it, got it. What about structure in your personal days so that you became that disciplined entrepreneur that you are now? Yes. Again, when you're running a kind of a mid-level

business, $500,000 to a million dollars a year, you know what, you can stay up late, you can watch TV shows, you can drink at night, you can go to sleep at 2 a.m. and you can still get up and hustle and grind and just make it happen. I'll tell you this, if you're trying to build a 5, 10, 15, 20, 40, 50 million dollar a year business, you have to be so personally structured and disciplined. Today, seven days a week, I go to bed at 10 p.m. at night, wake up at 5 a.m. and I have a structure that's a ritual that I've learned from you, truly, that's, that keeps me so dialed in and focus that I'm not tempted by my phone, I'm not tempted by Facebook, I'm not tempted to check my emails, I get up, I get the work done, I do the things that are within my 5%,

and I'm in the gym by 9 a.m. and at my headquarters by 12 noon helping out my staff to move the business forward. Yeah, it's really interesting. I've talked to so many people that are doing $250,000 a year and they are running around like a chicken with their head cut off, even though they only have a fraction of the responsibility of you do because you have those systems into place, which is so, so important. Now, how does having that focus on structure and scale allow you to see what other people can't see in the industry? Because of all the people I know, you see into the future of business, the trends, the predictions better than anybody else. Well, it's actually really simple.

When you are head down working in hustle and grind mode, and we all have to be. Make no mistake about it. You've got to put some heavy working in the beginning. The analogy I want to give you here, Craig, is when a 747 takes off from that runway, they are in full. thrust and they're using maximum amount of fuel and thrust to get that giant plane up. It's when they're cruising that they get to pull back and cruise and now they use actual metrics and scale and structure, if you will, to get you to your destination. And so for me, the big thing here was that if I have my head down and I'm always in grind mode, I can't

put my head up to see the future and the vision. And so as I hire the right team around me and I outsource the trivial stuff that I don't need to be doing, I can focus on the 5% which is to delegate, motivate, sell, and see the vision. Got it. Okay, so you now work with so many entrepreneurs in all different industries, not just a fitness industry. Can you tell if a person is going to be successful? And if so, what's the give? I'm not sure if we're still able to tell if someone can be successful, but there are some

hints that you start seeing. You start seeing this it factor. What is the it factor? When they start asking you the right questions, like when you know they're asking you old soul questions, I had a young man named Chris. I was doing a half-day coaching session with him, and he was asking me all the right questions. He's 29 years old. He's building his business.

It's doing about $12,000 a month right now. Not a bad business that's only been around for a year. But he already started asking me, so what happens when I hit $40,000 a month in revenue? Do I buy properties? Do I invest in mutual funds? Do I go with a Roth or a SEP IRA? And it's those questions that start giving me the hint that we're dealing with a true maturing entrepreneur and not someone who just owns a job.

Right, someone who's proactive and thinking about that big stuff in life. All right, so what do you look for in the team members that you hired a to support that scale and structure, which is so important? Yeah. You would think that you're supposed to look for a skill. And yeah, at some level, they have to have a skill. Like the guys in here, you know, there's audio guys, there's editing guys, there's video guys. They have the skill.

But the skill is available everywhere. What I'm really looking for, again, is going back to that it factor, that personality. Are they resilient? Do they have high emotional quotient so that if we say, guys, we're going for another four hours of filming today, instead of just the two that we're doing, we're going to another four hours. Are they going to fall apart or stay together? If I say, guys, we're going to go Facebook live now. Are they going to take a pause and go live or are they going to fall apart?

So you want emotional resilience out of your team, and you want not only a high emotional resilience quotient, but a high adversity resilient quotient, meaning, boss, I don't know what it is that you just asked me for it, but I'm going to figure it out versus, sorry, I don't know how to do. that and then it's left on to you to figure it out. Got it. So if you're looking at the question the other way, you know, who are people that are going to struggle? Things that they can fix, what are those things that they can fix so that they can become better entrepreneur and empire builder? Yeah, it's exactly the opposite. People who have high IQs, you go, gee, they're very intelligent, they've got a PhD in X, but the moment

they are dealt with the suck factor or some kind of adversity and they seize up, they have a low adversity quotient. They need to work on building their adversity quotient and they need to learn to build their emotional quotients because as an entrepreneur, there are things that are going to happen guaranteed that will rock you emotionally to the core. Right, right. Okay, so now that kind of leads into the last question I have, which is your phrase, never peak. And you said on stage the other day, you're going to be Kaisan, never ending improvement until your last breath. Tell us about the importance of that mindset. Yeah, you know, you remember the Sopranos? Yeah, yeah. So when the Sopranos... I never watched it, but I remember.

All right, all right. Well, so it's funny. I didn't watch it until a dozen years later. Right. Right. And so as I'm watching it, Tony Soprano has a saying in that show, and he says, remember when is the lowest form of conversation that any two people can have. And I thought about that statement because just a day before watching that episode, I was out with a friend at a coffee shop. We were friends from high school. And all he kept talking about is, hey, remember when we'd go to the beach?

Hey, remember when I was the best quarterback our high school team had? Not me. Was it Uncle Rico? It wasn't quite Uncle Rico. And it was always to remember ones, and I kept feeling uncomfortable about myself because I wanted to tell him about all the things that are happening in my life now that are great and exciting, and all the things I have that are coming in the future, the books I'm writing, the businesses I'm launching, the stages I'm going to be speaking from.

But all of his highlight reel was about the things that happened behind him. I just felt sick to my stomach. The very next day, it was like a sign from above. Tony Soprano says that the lowest form of conversation is when you talk about Remember When. And so that leads to this whole new idea that I came up with that, you know what, I'm never going to peek. I realized my friend had peaked in high school or just the towards end of high school. Some people peak right before marriage in their early 30s. And after that, they say it's all downhill, right?

It's not all downhill. So the idea is never peak. The best is yet to come. Or in other words, I'm going to Kai Zan evolve and get better until my very last breath. Awesome, awesome stuff. That's perfect place to end it on there. Bezos, thank you so much for teaching us today. Thank you, sir.

The man, the myth, the legend. Baderos Kulian, the Immigrant Edge.